Charles Brown

Late night, lights down low, bottle of wine at hand, someone to dream with, and Charles Brown, blues elegance personified -- now there's a scenario suit-able for any true romantic. Blues and R&B have had any number of outstanding boudoir balladeers, but Charles Brown, who died on January 21, 1999, always brought a special warmth and engaging personality to his efforts, and thus carved out for himself an exalted place among his peers and, for a few years in the late '40s and early '50s, the general public as well.

Born in Texas City, TX, Brown's burgeoning interest in music led him to Los Angeles after he graduated from Prairie View College. He formed an association with Ed Williams and Johnny Moore in a group they called the Three Blazers. Of their three wonderful voices, none stood out more than Brown's in its laconic grace and soothing timbre (comparable to Nat "King" Cole's "smoky gray" quality), attributes made more effective by the singer's unerring sense of propriety with regard to a lyrical phrase -- gingerly kneading key words, or stretching them over a few beats, to draw out an underlying feeling -- and frugal use of ornamentation (deep bass dips, or a conversational or recitative style) for greatest emotional impact. The Three Blazers hit it big out of the box in 1945 with "Driftin' Blues," a song Brown had written in high school, which remained on the R&B chart for nearly six months, until Brown went solo. On his own, he wrote and recorded numerous upper-level R&B chart singles -- nine in 1949 alone -- including two #1s in 1949's "Trouble Blues" and 1951's "Black Night." All the while this was happening, a Christmas song he wrote and recorded with the Three Blazers in 1947, the melancholy "Merry Christmas, Baby," was becoming a seasonal classic, charting every year in the first three years after its release. While "Driftin' Blues" is regarded as his signature song, "Merry Christmas, Baby" has lived on in numerous cover versions, by far the most powerful being Elvis Presley's tour de force of blues vocalizing on his Elvis Sings the Wonderful World of Christmas LP. Collectables' Driftin' Blues: The Best of Charles Brown is the must-have CD charting these fruitful years.

Brown's chart run ended in 1952, and he became so low-profile he seemed to have dropped off the Earth for a couple of decades. Brown in fact stayed on the road, and every so often found a small label here or there that was happy to have him for a moment. Blues n' Brown, released in 1995, is a ten-song collection of low-down blues -- most of them cowritten by Brown -- recorded at the Modern/Kent studios in Los Angeles in 1971, with producer Maxwell Davis.

Praise be to Bullseye Blues, which performed a great service in giving Jimmy McCracklin and Charles Brown a home, to the benefit of both artists. Brown's first Bullseye effort, All My Life, is another smooth, assured outing showing off the artist's interpretive powers. Throughout these sessions his vocals reflect a stronger sense of love as an impermanent state in being more resonant, more nuanced, more ambivalent than on any of his other recordings.

Possibly as a response to the harder edge of All My Life, Someone to Love is soft, mellow, back-to-the-boudoir fare, beginning with the Brown–Bonnie Raitt duet on the title track, which finds the two singers engaged in the vocal equivalent of long, meaningful looks into each other's eyes, and discreet, under-the-table hand-holding. The same year he recorded Someone to Love, Brown slipped into a San Francisco studio for three days and came back with Blues and Other Love Songs (originally released on Muse in 1992, it has been reissued by 32 Jazz), produced by the formidable tenor saxophonist Houston Person, who lent his distinctive touch to five of the songs, including a barn-burning workout on his version of "One Mint Julep."

Brown's 1994 Bullseye release, Just a Lucky So and So, is a more ornate affair in that Brown is backed not only by a small combo, but also by the Crescent City Horns (the album was recorded in New Orleans) and the New Orleans Strings. The pleasing result is a combination of the best of the Mainstream style with the small-combo midnight blues of Someone to Love.

In the late '90s Brown and his regular working combo -- a tight, tasty quartet that included Clifford Solomon on tenor sax, Danny Caron on guitar (and providing some savvy business guidance to Brown's career), Ruth Davies on bass, and Gaylord Birch (who passed away after the sessions for the 1996 release, Honey Dripper) on drums -- cut three fine albums for Verve that turned out to be Brown's final, stirring testimony on disc. Although his voice was now a matured, slightly weathered instrument, his phrasing and preternatural cool remained things of wonder, his piano playing retained its characteristic ebullience and sensitivity, and the band played tight, economical support behind him. Some of the most memorable moments in this album trifecta come when Brown goes minimalist, as on the solo piano and vocal on a moody version of Duke Ellington's "I Got It Bad (and That Ain't Good)" and a grand, stately reimagining of "Amazing Grace," both from These Blues; or the angular, New Orleans–style solo piano ruminations underpinning his solo performance of Thomas A. Dorsey's gospel monument "Precious Lord" on Honey Dripper (which also features, in addition to the Joe Liggins title tune, two new Brown songs: the slow-grinding blues of "News All Over Town" and a lively jump blues quite at odds with the subject matter, "I Cried Last Night," enlivened by robust tenor sax solos courtesy of Clifford Solomon and some fleet-fingered runs by guitarist Danny Caron); or, on So Goes Love, a gospel-influenced rendition of "Stormy Monday," with Brown's smooth crooning supported only by his steady rolling piano lines and Solomon's restrained tenor sax punctuations, and an album-closing solo piano-vocal downcast blues ballad, "Blue Because of You." Those were the last notes of Brown's career on record, and when all was said and done he had produced a body of work over the course of 53 years that was remarkable for its consistency and its soulful expressiveness. Gone he may be, but Charles Brown's music lives on, timeless and majestic to the highest degree. (DOUGLAS MCGEE)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide